Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7470455" data-attributes="member: 42582">Huh? A version of my that was triple my height (and hence 27 times my mass) but otherwise physically/biologically identical would not be able to stand or walk. This is a basic fact about real world biomechanical processes.However, such beings in the world of D&D are able to stand and walk. Hence, either (i) they are not physically/biologically like humans, or (ii) the world of D&D is not constrained by real world biomechanical processes.You appear to assert (i). I assert (ii), on the grounds that it fits with a sensible theory of storytelling.Again, huh?I don't understand your point. People tell stories all the time that are inconsistent with physical possibility - look at Gygax's story of a hero flying to the moon on a flying steed, which piles impossibility on impossibility!Aristotle did imagined things that were inconsistent with what is physically possible - eg he not only imagined, but in fact believed, that the real world was one in which planets and the sun moved about the earth in "spheres". And that belief, it turns out, is inconsistent with many, many ovservations about the real world, the planets and the sun.But Aristotle was able to maintain his false beliefs because he didn't know about those observations (most of them not having been made yet).The stories that me and my players tell when we play Classic Traveller are not internally consistent, because we posit both that human beings have the biology and biochemistry they do in the real workd, and that solar systems exist, and are formed, just as they are in the real world, and yet we also posit FTL travel by means of "jump" drives, which is clearly inconsistent with all that other scientific fact.We maintain our story by simply not focusing our attention on the points of contradiction.The idea that tellers of fairy stories are, in fact, imagining that the world is governed by the scientific rules taught in science faculties, and are therefore positing that their pixies and giants and pegasi and giant scorpions and the like all have bizarre unearthly biology that makes their existence physically possible, is one that I've not encountered until you and [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] advocated it in this thread.</blockquote>

Verification